Serial killers can easily live double lives: Experts

A 1999 file photo of Dr. Elliott Leyton,
a professor emeritus at Memorial University and author of the book Hunting
Humans at his home in Paradise Falls.

Photograph by: Joe Gibbons, St. John's Telegram

Elliott Leyton says it surprises him how many people think it would be
difficult for a killer to conceal his crimes from those closest to him.

Duplicity and compartmentalization are easy for a lot of people, he says,
especially when they're doing something so horrific.

Serial killers are sociopaths, and have no feelings of guilt or remorse
for those they harm. "So they're not being torn apart," says Leyton, a
Canadian anthropologist and expert on the psychology of multiple killers.

"If you strangled somebody in a fit of rage, you wouldn't be able to cope
with it. You'd either kill yourself or turn yourself in. The thought of it
would be just utterly overwhelming to you," Leyton says. "You would at some
point be able to see what you've done — you've killed a human being."

But serial killers don't see others as human beings, he says, only tools
or toys to be used.

"So they have no guilt, no remorse, no feelings of having done something
wrong," Leyton says. "There's just more triumph."

If police and a Crown prosecutor can prove the startling allegations of
murder and rape facing Col. Russell Williams, the air force commander
charged with killing two women and sexually assaulting two others, the
question many will be asking is: How could he have hidden his dark secret
from his wife?

For serial murderers like Robert Pickton, one of Canada's most prolific
killers, secrets can be easy to hide. Convicted in 2007 of the murder of six
women who disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Pickton was a
loner, living on a Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm "in the middle of
nowhere," says Mike Arntfield, professor of information and media studies at
the University of Western Ontario in London, and a 10-year police veteran.
"It's not difficult for him to keep his activities a secret."

But there are cases of killers living duplicitous, dichotomous double
lives, he says, who "feign normality as this soccer dad and loving husband,
and then they have this deep dark secret."

Dennis Rader, the so-called BTK ("bind, torture and kill") strangler,
murdered 10 people around Wichita, Kan., between 1974 and 1991 before he was
caught. Rader was a bylaw officer and father of two, a Cub Scout leader and
an elder in his Lutheran church.

Leyton says serial killers all live double lives, "and do so with ease."

Williams was an elite pilot, a "shining bright star" of the military, who
rose through the ranks during his 23-year career to fly the prime minister
and Governor General across Canada and overseas in one of four Canadian
Forces Challenger jets.

He and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, have a cottage in Tweed, Ont.,
as well as a newly built home in Ottawa, where Harriman works for the Heart
and Stroke Foundation of Canada. The two have no children.

They have been a couple since at least 1991, the year a search of old
city directories shows they were sharing the same apartment in Portage la
Prairie, Man., where Williams was then working as a flying instructor at the
Canadian Forces Flying Training School.

"We often wrestle with how they do it, the double life. Why they stay
with someone to whom they do not reveal," says Dr. Frank Farley, a
psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia and past president of the
American Psychological Association.

The relationship can provide a legitimacy, a cover, says Farley, a native
of Edmonton. But it can also provide crucial emotional stability in an
otherwise unstable, violent and risky life, a psychological space the killer
can step into. "That has survival value for him, surviving in his head when
he's doing these heinous other things to women.

"He can red-line that relationship with her, keep it intact,
compartmentalize it."

Farley stressed he can only speculate on the Williams case. But as many
as 20 per cent of men state in anonymous surveys that they have had affairs.
"If we can maintain this kind of dual lives, if many people can do it in
ordinary life, we shouldn't be surprised that some people are able to
maintain it at a more extreme level."

For men with a sexual preoccupation or paraphilia — defined as frequent,
intense and sexually arousing fantasies or behaviours that usually involve
objects (such as shoes or underwear), the infliction of pain, or having sex
with non-consenting people — "nobody will know that he has it, even his wife
won't know," says Dr. Kulwant Riar, an associate professor in the division
of forensic psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

He was involved in the case of a man who killed a woman, and then raped
her corpse. "He kept her with him for a while," Riar says.

The man's ex-wife later told Riar that whenever she had sex with her
husband, "he didn't want her to move at all, just lie dead."

"She didn't think anything of it at the time, because she didn't know
anything about it."

Sexual deviancy doesn't start overnight.

"A lot of these things start when they're kids," says Tod Burke, a
criminal justice professor at Radford University in Virginia and a former
Maryland police officer who has published on profiling serial killers. "They
have a fetish, and it could be a lingerie fetish, and just going through
someone's laundry, or going to a laundromat to steal it, that thrill is not
enough, and so they one up it. So now, let's break into homes and steal it.
And now let's say the person is in the home. Now we can tie them up and do
this.

"It just keeps going and going and going. They get to a point where they
become out of control, even though they're control freaks."